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NVIDIA Launches Interactive Ray Tracing Engine

, August 04, 2009

NVIDIA has introduced the NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing engine, part of a suite of application acceleration engines for software developers. NVIDIA acceleration engines are designed to incorporate high-performance capabilities into applications, while still reducing development time.

The NVIDIA OptiX engine is a programmable ray tracing pipeline enabling software developers to bring new levels of realism to their applications using traditional C programming. By tapping into the massively parallel computing power of NVIDIA Quadro processors, the OptiX engine accelerates the ray tracing used across a spectrum of disciplines, including: photorealistic rendering, automotive styling, acoustical design, optics simulation, volume calculations and radiation research. Application developers are utilizing the OptiX engine to redefine what's possible for designers, engineers and researchers.

"Thousands of applications are being created today that harness the phenomenal power of GPUs, a clear sign that GPU computing has reached a tipping point. The world of computing is shifting from host-bound processing on CPUs to balanced co-processing on GPUs and CPUs," said NVIDIA's Jeff Brown. "NVIDIA application acceleration engines arm developers with the tools they need to further revolutionize both real-time graphics and advanced data analysis."

The NVIDIA CompleX scene scaling engine enables applications to maintain interactivity when working with extremely large and complex models.

The NVIDIA PhysX 64-bit physics engine brings hyper-realistic, real-time physics to professional applications. Already a proven and popular solution within the computer games industry, the 64-bit version of PhysX will permit more accurate calculations on far larger data sets for engineers, designers and animators wanting to interrogate their data, model physical properties and breathe life into their work.

NVIDIA application acceleration engines are available from the NVIDIA Developer Zone at no charge. The SceniX and CompleX engines can be downloaded at http://developer.nvidia.com/page/home.html. The OptiX and PhysX 64-bit engines will be available in fall of 2009. Interactive ray tracing examples using the pre-release OptiX engine can be downloaded at http://developer.nvidia.com/object/optix-examples.html and run on NVIDIA Quadro FX processors.

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